Iain Alexander

Welcome to Conversation with a chef.

I’m honoured to talk to you. I’ve been following your page for a while, it’s cool.

Thank you. I really like that we have a Melbourne Christchurch connection, because for me that’s really important. We were just saying that you’re in Christchurch and it’s cold and it’s a bit sleepy old Christchurch but at least you’re all open and able to go out and do things. We’re all locked down wearing masks.

Yes, very true. I think Jacinda and the Labour Party dealt with the Covid crisis very well. It set the bar in what countries should be doing to try and handle it. But yes, Christchurch is cool. Being from the Northern Hemisphere, this is the coldest I have been on August 1st and I have the heat pump blasting. You’re from Christchurch?

Yes, I am. I moved over here after the earthquakes in 2011. I’d been thinking of coming and that gave me the push to do it. I think Christchurch, for its size is amazing in terms of what there is on the art scene, music, food…

Totally and you can feel that when you’re in and around the city. I have a friend who works for the Court Theatre here and it’s very creative. And you’re so close to the beach and Banks Peninsula for foraging mussels and that sort of thing. It’s a cool little city. Well, it’s more like a town. Coming from Melbourne, Melbourne was a hub for food and arts and culture so it was a shock and I think I’m still resentful I’m not in Europe right now for the career and cooking. But there are great spots to go out to, we’ve been finding local joints.

How long have you been there?

We left Melbourne on March 3rd and did a bit of a road trip in the North Island and went to Whangamata and all the spots. Then we came down to the South Island because my girlfriend is from Ashburton and we came down to spend a few days with them. We ended up living there for two months because it was just a few days before lockdown. We were homeless and they graciously put us up and fed us for the few months we were in lockdown.

I did see Ashburton on your posts, and I thought you’d have to know someone from there. No one from Canada just turns up in Ashburton.

I don’t think anyone really stops in Ashburton unless they needed to get something to eat on the way to Queenstown, like KFC or something.

Tell me, Iain, whereabouts in Canada are you from?

Just north of Vancouver, so speaking of stopping at fast food joints off highways, if you were travelling from Vancouver to Whistler, you’d pass McDonalds in my hometown, Squamish. It was the sleepy little mountain town on the west coast before the Olympics were announced back in 2005 and then it exploded into a bit of a bedroom community for people living in the city. It kind of is a little bit like Ashburton is to Christchurch. You know it has two or three decent restaurants, 20 000 people. It has heaps of biking and hiking and climbing and all that stuff.

Was that what your childhood was made up of?

Yeah. I think my mom said one time that the best babysitter she ever had was the forest. I was always out there with friends, getting dirty. It was cool. I was chatting about this with my girlfriend not long ago, we grew up as the last generation free from the chains of technology. So coming home after school, we were always playing outside; playing street hockey or kicking a ball around or out in the bush. Then grade 9 or 10 was when Facebook and cell phones became a thing. I still remember VHS movies and going to the video store to rent movies on a Friday night.

There’s a charm to that. I think it’s great that we can remember those times. I think it was certainly a different time and it was charming.

I’m nostalgic for those times.

When you were growing up, was your family really into food or what made you think about becoming a chef?

You know what, when did we talk about doing this…? Last week? I was anticipating that question and I tried to uncover an answer for myself. I’m not from a foodie family. My parents are divorced and dad has been married a couple of times and he didn’t really do any of the cooking when I was visiting him. Mom just really fed me to nourish me; I don’t want to call it working class, but it was really wholesome, easy, filling, food. Still to this day my favourite food is mom-cooked; curried beans and sausages or mince and beans with white bread and butter and a cup of tea. Just down the road from us in Squamish was a really good Japanese place and every payday, so every second Friday, mom would take me down to the Japanese restaurant for dinner. That started when I was about five or six and that really opened my eyes to the fact there were other foods out there, there are different things to eat; there are different people who different things and mom would have beef tataki or sushi with raw fish and we would eat with chopsticks and it was a cool event twice a month. That opened my eyes and maybe planted a seed for later on. I had no thought of ever becoming a cook or becoming a chef, if you want to say chef, I don’t necessarily know what a chef is.

My mom will tell you that she always knew I was going to cook. She never ever told me what to do with my life except twice and she said, I think you should be a chef. I would laugh at her; it was so far from my thinking and my world view and my values. It wasn’t even a job to me. I went to University and did a year of architecture; that’s what my dad does, and I was planning to take over the family business. I didn’t really like it and I wanted to make a lot of money. You don’t go into the creative careers to make money, so I transferred into business. 

I really excelled in study; I was an academic success, you know Valedictorian, straight As. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, just studied and studied. I did really well and I thought when I graduated that life was going to be easy because I had worked so hard at university. But it didn’t turn out that way. I started working in finance in Vancouver, so three piece suit every day, shiny shoes, 30th floor of a finance building in Vancouver. From the outside looking in, I should have been happy, I was doing really well. But I was desperately unhappy. I was fighting the notion that that was what success meant and the confines of society we have all agreed upon. I crashed and burned. I was really tired of it, so I got a job working for about $15 or $16 bucks an hour at a brewery just down the road from my house and that was my start in hospitality, just slinging beer and putting labels on beer bottles. Black Kettle Brewing; they’re still around in Vancouver. That was the beginning of the end.

Or was it the beginning of happiness?

It was that, for sure. Once my ego died, I could lean into the happiness, but there was a long time of thinking that working in hospo wasn’t a real career and that I’d let my parents down; I’d spent $40k on my education and I was making less than the minimum wage. I had my demons.

What was the turning point where you accepted hospitality as a career for you where you could embrace it?

I think looking back now, I had become severely depressed in finance. People only talked about money; it was a bit of a boys’ club and they’d discussed how many grs they had slept with and the client they were working on and how much commission they were getting. it wasn’t fulfilling. When I quit that, I didn’t have anything lined up and I spent three months sleeping on mom’s couch dismantling my life and trying to establish a value system and how it works to navigate the world. But then hospitality, bartending was just a job and it was fun. I was really listening to my dad’s advice which was, you’ve just had all this success in school, just go and have fun; pour beer, drink beer and party and get the young person energy out of your system. But I got bitten by the hospitality bug; bartending was social and fun. You can’t deny when you are somewhere that makes you happy and doing something for yourself and you don’t have to subscribe to someone else’s idea of success if I’m happy doing this. And I was very happy bartending. It was really creative and fun. I was bartending in downtown Vancouver after the brewery and making tons of money and working on my new ideas. That job came to an end and I got a job at the Sea to Sky gondola in Squamish, my hometown. I was bartending up there and then in the winter when it was a bit slower, I would help out the chef in the kitchen for extra hours. I would literally be cutting up 200 kilos or something of mushrooms for six hours. I did not know how to clean a mushroom properly or to put a paper towel under your chopping board so it wouldn’t slip but I was wonderfully and naively happy cutting mushrooms for six hours. I thought it was fun and I was hooked. That was probably the turning point; cutting mushrooms.

Even in hospitality, there were people who told me I should be a chef and that I’d be great in a kitchen but I didn’t know what that meant. Cooking was just too complicated for me. I could understand a cocktail, you know, a base liquor, some modifiers, some juice, some bitters, shaken or stirred, it was easy and approachable and generally if you put liquor in front of people even if it doesn’t taste that good, they’re going to get drunk anyway and have a good time, so the risk reward was manageable. But cooking, you look at a wonderful plate and there are so many elements and so much technique and things you have to know; like braising a beef cheek or sauteeing or searing or seasoning or what’s in season. It was intimidating. But one of the sous chefs at the gondola left to take over a restaurant in town and I begged him for a job. I told him to take me with him because he knew me and my personality and I wanted him to teach me how to cook. That was March 2017, so I haven’t been cooking that long.

Once he taught you a few things, did that demystify it for you? Because obviously now you are cooking.

It did. I think it was more confidence. being in a kitchen and being on line on a Friday and Saturday night serving 200 people. It was very basic small town food; it was a kind of Cajun barbecue place. We would smoke ribs and chicken wings and pulled pork and do French fries and burgers, so any culinary technique was minimal but it was the kind of joint in town where you’d go for a burger and beer and sit for hours on the patio and order ore and more so we would get slammed there Frida and Saturday nights. If you’ve read anything by Bourdain I was living Kitchen Confidential, that kind of pirate ship, yelling, screaming, fryer culture. It was great, I was hooked on that energy. Beers before work, during work, after work. When you’re 23, you don’t want to be anywhere else. I was on top of the world.

What’s the jump then, because that’s not that long ago and when you were in Melbourne you were cooking with Scott Pickett and that’s more of a fine dining, elevated style of food. tell me what happened after the burger slinging and beer drinking?

Clearly by that time I’d accepted that this was what I wanted to do with my life. And coming from the story I just described of being in finance and being unhappy, I was very much ok with living in a tent and just cooking. Once I’d accepted that it was what I wanted to do, I just went head-first into looking at it as a craft and something I would have to…not master, but I wanted to be good at what I do. So I approached it like I did my studies. I was ripping through cookbooks, reading every autobiography, biography on chefs I could think of and I still do that to this day. I always have my nose in some sort of culinary literature.

Do you take notes? I know some people always have a notebook at the ready.

I should send you a picture. I think I have maybe six or seven notebooks. It drives me insane. My memory and brain system is external to my body. There’s always a scribble somewhere. So anyway to answer your question, I started talking to chefs to find out what the next step for me was. If we’re equating Ashburton with Squamish, there’s nowhere really to go in that same town that would have projected me to that next level. Even Vancouver was too close and there are maybe two or three restaurants that I could have tried to get a stage at; like Bauhaus, Hawksworth and PiDGiN, which was Asian food but it was just too close to home.

Around that same time I was reading something where someone had done a little write up on Melbourne and the food scene in Australia. So I had in my mind, Melbourne. Then MasterChef…and I hate I’m bringing up MasterChef talking to you, but MasterChef Australia was on and they were always talking about Melbourne spots. Then we hired a chef from New South Wales at the place I was working and we would just hang out and talk about food and he told me I had to get out of the town and get out of that restaurant and I should buy a one way ticket to Melbourne and cook, so that’s what I did. I had no money and heaps of credit card debt but I just rolled up my knives, put my stuff in a bag and flew in to Sydney. He was back in Australia so he put me up for a week and then I took a bus and train to Melbourne and lived in a hostel for about three months.

In St Kilda?

No, not in St Kilda. I think if I had stayed in a hostel in St Kilda, I wouldn’t have got any work done. I was at Europa hostel in Queen Street, so just two or three blocks down from Queen Vic Market where Scott had the Deli. I just started walking around the city handing out resumes. I didn’t really have any restaurant in mind, I just wanted something quick and easy to get some money in the bank so I could move out of the hostel. I walked into Pickett’s Deli and the rest is history. That was a really cool place to work. It was really like a scratch café; we did everything by hand. The head chef, Alejandro, who I’m still in touch with, had been at Vue de Monde and the sous chef, Bruno, was well educated in food and it was them and me and I’d just been flipping burgers and making French fries. I remember the first morning, learning to make a Bernaise and Hollandaise and we made our own brown sauce. We made our own pastrami and brined chicken. The learning there was huge and it was incredible. If I believed in a God, he definitely directed me to that café. The learning was astronomical. And getting to work with Scott and the boys on his team was pretty cool.

He is such a character and is so driven and really believes in hospitality and I think he gathers staff around him who have that same ethos and it is always such a pleasure to be in any of his establishments. I am in awe of Scott Pickett and what he has done for hospitality.

Totally. I don’t think he gets enough recognition outside of Australia. I had never heard of him. I had heard of Vue de Monde before I came to Australia and Neil Perry and Rockpool, but when you get to Melbourne and you drop his name, everyone is in awe of Scott and rightly so. His energy is palpable and his standard and his quality and his palate…he was a really amazing guy to work for and I was really fortunate to have the opportunity to work at the deli and at Matilda. He took me up to Wye River because he bought some property up there and he asked me if I would help. So I had a weekend up there with Scott and so I got to know him outside the kitchen and restaurant. He has the same personality and the amount of obsession to detail and it’s amazing to see and really inspiring.

You mentioned foraging now that you’re in New Zealand, but how did you get into that? Did someone teach you about it or is it from a book? Did you do it here?

It’s a bit of everything, I guess. Really just reading about it. If you’re reading about food right now or autobiographies, unless you’re living under a rock, you know that really great restaurants are foraging. It was made extremely popular with Noma. Essentially my value is that in my personal life I don’t really want to participate in this industrial food chain that unfortunately we have to be part of. Going to Woolworths and buying chicken that doesn’t look like chicken and buying beef that doesn’t look like cow and everything is so processed and 90% of everything that is processed is just derivatives of corn, we really are just eating corn. Long story short, I really want to be part of the process at the beginning, middle and end. I’d like to grow something in my garden, cook it and feed someone vs going to the supermarket and being at the end of the process. I get immense satisfaction from fishing, I grew up fishing. There is nothing, in my opinion, that comes close to line-caught salmon from the river. You gut it, clean it, take it home and put it on the barbecue. The Japanese have perfected the killing, curing and ageing of fish but fresh salmon and fresh halibut are a gift from God. So getting out and seeing where things come from. I think is a responsibility of every cook to know where their food comes from and to be part of the procurement process. And also people dig it when you put down a plate of food and at least one element is from your garden. I have garnishes in the back garden now in Christchurch; micro herbs and flowers. Number one its cheaper and number two, you can say, hey the garnish is from my garden. That’s just cool.

It’s immensely satisfying, isn’t it? I often bring up Annie Smithers who has her restaurant in Trentham out of Melbourne and grows all the vegetables she uses in her restaurant. She talks about the respect you have for a product when you’ve nurtured it through from a seedling. You don’t waste it, you celebrate this thing you’ve seen grow from nothing into this incredible thing we can eat. 

Totally. And that goes for anything. If you are standing in an ice-cold river in January, so back home when the winter steelhead move up the river, they are very elusive, they’re like a snow leopard. You’re very lucky if you catch one in your life. If you’re standing in an icy river with two feet of snow, waiting for this fish to maybe come and then you catch one, the amount of respect you’re going to have for that fish and everything on its body is immense. 

Everything can be used. You know I think the statistic I’ve read is that we waste 30% of the edible plant matter on a cauliflower before it even enters the processing chain, so right at the ground when it’s pulled up, all the leaves which are delicious and taste wonderfully like cauliflower are thrown away. Then it gets to the supermarket and we bring it home and what do we do? We peel back all those leaves to get at the white, bland cauliflower, but if you taste the leaves, they’re a star, they’re incredible. And the same goes for broccoli with its stem and all that.

I was talking to one of the chefs at Stokehouse and he was talking about Brussel sprouts and to be honest, I did not even know that Brussel sprouts grew on massive stalks, so number one I learned that. And then he was doing stuff with the actual stalk, he was charring it and using it a bit like a marrow bone where he was removing the insides and preparing them and then stuffing it. That’s why I love talking to chefs…

I know, it’s insane. I love talking to other chefs about that. It’s super inspiring. Now all I can think about is making a vegan bone marrow out of Brussel sprout stalk.

I know! But also as you were saying when you first started off, not knowing to put a paper towel under your chopping board…before all this Covid stuff happened, I used to volunteer at FareShare where we cooked up meals for those in need and just when the chefs there would come over and demonstrate chopping or whatever, the techniques you guys have that are so practical and shortcuts and amazing. I’m always in awe.

I’m still like that and I think that’s the key; to surround yourself with people who are better than you. I think it comes from necessity. I learned that at Matilda. When you have lunch and dinner service seven days a week, if something will save you 30 seconds or a minute or two, you’ll do that faster or more efficient way.

For sure. Now, tell me what you’re doing in Christchurch. You’re doing a private dining thing?

I don’t want to call it fine dining…I don’t know what fine dining is. But it’s high end private dining in your own home. I’m offering a 3, 5, 7 course dinner for up to six guests and we come, we cook, we clean and you just sit back and pour your wine and we take care of the rest. The idea came out of lockdown when I was just so gutted seeing friends and colleagues on Instagram and everyone across the world in hospitality being hammered; the industry was haemorrhaging and someone back home, one of the restaurants or cafes had put a chalkboard outside their café saying something like, if you want to know what it’s like to work in hospitality during a pandemic, it’s the same as the band on the Titanic…that scene where they are playing as the boat goes under. That’s the mentality…we just want to cook, even if the ship is sinking. I was terrified that I wouldn’t have an industry to come into. We were on our way to the Netherlands and just stopping off in New Zealand. I was going to try and get a job in a Michelin star restaurant in Amsterdam. I was aware that jobs might not exist and we were going to stay in New Zealand so I thought if I can’t get a job, I’ll create a job. So I just sat down and wrote a menu and I created a little website. It just took off. I think Covid was a blessing in that sense because when New Zealand opened up, people weren’t going to restaurants as often but they could accommodate groups of up to 10 at home, so people were throwing dinner parties and they just wanted restaurant quality food but they didn’t want to leave their home because their home was a safe zone. Christchurch is small so it has been word of mouth and referrals and a bit of stuff on social media. It has been really gratifying.

I think that’s the next step for chefs; to cook their own food and share it with people who are willing to eat it. That’s what hospitality is, isn’t it? And you said it before, especially if you’re able to bring it right through from the start of the product and you take it all the way through to putting it on a plate and you can see their joy, that’s what it is.

I don’t want to say it’s better than sex, but it’s pretty close.

I think Christchurch is good with that kind of scenario because even when I was finishing off at university, I was a waitress for a French chef who went into peoples’ homes and I had a really funny experience actually. He had said to me that I’d just have to accept that because he was a French chef, the diners were all in awe of him and they could be a bit dismissive of the waitress, which is exactly what happened. I had these people asking me whether I’d ever thought of doing anything else with my life and it was very satisfying to tell them I had just finished my PhD. But then I thought that it’s great that chefs are so well thought of but I wanted to ask you about that because a couple of times you’ve qualified things….number one, what’s a chef and what’s a cook and also, what is fine dining, and I just wondered whether you had a bit of an aversion to labels?

Yeah. I could speak a long time on that topic. I don’t know if it’s that I am rebellious by nature…like in a few months I’m sure I’m going to hate foraging. I shouldn’t say that, but I hate things that become very popular because they’re popular. It turns me off. One of my values is authenticity and I think if something becomes popular, especially with Instagram.

Well, just don’t Instagram your foraging. Foraging is primordial. You don’t get more authentic than foraging.

That’s right. It goes back to our animalistic, reptilian brain.

Yeah so just don’t tell people you’re doing it.

But you know what I mean. Certain restaurants become popular…I don’t want to trash other cooks, but I went to Chin Chin when I first got to Melbourne and I thought it was going to be awesome and it was just not. It really wasn’t great but there was a huge line outside the door. So I thought maybe they’re just having an off day, so I went back again and it was the same thing. I have an aversion to that…even Noma when they had their burger bar and there was a line outside. I want to eat there because it’s Noma but does it match the Noma buzz from 10 years ago? Probably not. So to answer your question about labels, the people I really admire, the two people in particular I have up on a pedestal in this industry, in this game, are the opposite of what you’d think a chef is. What even is a chef? Is it someone who went to culinary school, went to France and worked his or her way up and then takes over a restaurant as head chef for a few years and then opens their own place and has their name on it but doesn’t cook any more. Like Gordon Ramsay. How many times does he cook now? Is he a chef? I don’t know. I cook food. 

David Chang really inspired me and he will tell you that he had no business opening a restaurant and they were his words. He cooked at some really good places but not for a long time and he was never a sous chef or a head chef and neither was I. When he tried to recruit people he used to work with, they didn’t want to work with him because he wasn’t good enough. And look at him now. And there’s a chef in Chicago, Iliana Regan who I got in touch with on Instagram after finishing her book, Burn the Place, which if anyone is into cooking at all, I highly recommend reading it because it’s the most honest account of cooking I’ve ever read and she is very honest about her own shortcomings and substance abuse which we have all dealt with. I got in touch with her and it’s the same thing, she was a server for most of her career in hospitality and started cooking and opened her own restaurant. These are the kind of people who forged the path for me and I identify with that path and culinary school and then taking over a really intense restaurant and by the time you’re 30, you’re just burned out and don’t have enough energy to open your own place. In Iliana’s book, her message is, what are you waiting for? Permission? And when I read that, I knew it was time to just jump off the cliff and if the parachute opens, great, but if not, well I have a business degree and I could just go and work for ANZ or something.

I don’t think linearly…what was your question…labels? Yeah, I let other people decide. I can’t describe how people describe me or how people label me. I cook food and it makes me happy and it exercises the creative part of me that I really enjoy. I’ve heard friends say, he’s a chef, he’s a fine-dining chef and I sort of curl up inside.

Well ok, but labels are just a way of people understanding what you’re doing; making sense of it. When I look at the food you’re putting up for Hazel Dining, it does look fine dining, but that is only because it looks like it has been done with precision and it is beautifully presented on the plate and it’s not a burger and chips so it’s fine dining. 

That’s kind of you to say and from that point of view, I guess it does fall closer to a higher end of modern dining with the plating and so on.

Well it’s not curried beans or mince and that is also good food.

If there is ever an opportunity for you to taste my mom’s curried beans and sausages, it will change your life.

I believe you. Tell me what’s on your next menu. Give me an example of some of your food.

I was working on some stuff for when the weather turns around. I was thinking of starting with some sort of consommé or beef broth, a well-seasoned amuse-bouche to wet the palate and then some sort of snacks or bites. I want to do a salad…if you read my menu, the dishes are named around one or two elements. I like each bite to have a relationship between two elements in your mouth so I want to do a salad that’s plated with little mounds of five or six bites of the same thing, but really summery so watermelon, radish, olive, mango, pistachios. I’ve been playing around with the edible soil idea which has been done, and again I don’t really like it because it’s popular but I want to do it because U haven’t done it before. So I’m experimenting with different flours, like almond flour, ground coffee beans that I’m toasting and making a sweet edible flour…so I’m just kind of experimenting with a summer garden. I’ve put down braised endive and radicchio here as a course. I can see that working with some sort of sauce. Cured snapper and kiwi or octopus. When I first started dating my girlfriend, her dad told her that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach so the first few months we were dating, she was coking non-stop and I think it worked. But one night she made fish tacos and she got this recipe for a kiwi salsa out of a Jamie Oliver cookbook and it’s banging. It’s really good so I’ve been playing around with that. The kiwis are kinda sweet but they leave that metallic tang on your tongue, so I’ve been trying to macerate it in honey overnight to get rid of that and then pureeing it up. I think that would go really well with snapper.

I’ve heard kiwis are really good for curing octopus, makes it really tender.

I can see that working. Then I’ve been getting into pickling a lot at home here. I want to do a pickle plate with traditional things like cauliflower and fennel and then some other unique stuff you get in the markets here. That’s what is really awesome in Christchurch, the markets. Every week, all year around there are heaps of markets.

It sounds great.

It’s an illness, an obsession. I can’t stop. 

Well, it’s a good obsession to have I think. 

It’s healthy, yeah.

So you’ll be doing that for the next while I suppose until you can get overseas.

Yeah that’s the plan, for the learning. I mentioned that chef Iliana Regan, I’m going to be working with her, staging, up on the upper Michigan peninsula in the US this time next year. I need to learn some skill and technique and bringing that back home. I’d like to do some pop-ups here in some restaurants or hole in the wall places and do a dinner for 10 to 15 people before we leave. We’ll see how we go, one day at a time.

Iain thank you so much for your time, I really feel as though I knew nothing about you and know I feel as though I’ve got enough to write several books.

Several books, well, if you do…but let’s stay in touch and if we’re ever in the same city it would be great to meet you.

Stay safe, take care.

Hazel Private Dining, Christchurch